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All
Saints, Billockby

Billockby
church is a landmark, alone on a rise to the east of the
Acle to Stalham road. There is no other building near.
You reach it along tiny lanes cut deep between rolling
fields, but in fact these lanes run into busy roads, and
Billockby church's isolation is something of an illusion.
Nevertheless, it is an easy one to maintain if you stand
in the tree-surrounded churchyard, the fields rolling
away in all directions, without another human being in
sight.

This must
have been a fine church once, but the tower was rent
asunder by a lightning strike in 1762. Judging by the
crack the event must have been spectacular - I hope
nobody was inside it at the time. As so often happens,
falling masonry destroyed the nave, and all that was left
was the chancel. However, as discussed in the introduction, this proved
sufficient to the needs of the congregation, who made it
safe, huddled in it miserably until a full-scale
restoration of 1872, and left the rest a picturesque
ruin. And so it remains.

The
thatched chancel is cottage-like, and seemed
especially so on a sunny spring day in 2011, with
the churchyard full of flowers coming into bloom.
One survival of the collapse was the south porch,
which now stands alone against the ruin of the
south nave wall. There is some interesting 17th
Century graffiti on the eastern jamb of the south
doorway; Henry Mann and William Tooley came to
visit from neighbouring Clippesby in May 1671,
and made sure that future generations would know
about it. Perhaps there wasn't a visitors book in
those days.

Not that Billockby church
needs a visitors book, for I have to tell you
that All Saints is pretty much the only church in
the entire Broads area which is kept locked
without a keyholder notice. Many must be the
pilgrims and passing strangers who make their way
up here, but there is no Christian welcome within
the gate, I am afraid. So I cannot tell you what
the chancel is like inside. However, it is a
simple matter to climb over the fence on the
north side of the building and into the former
nave, where you can stand for a moment and
imagine yourself back into the late medieval
heyday of the building, before the chancel arch
was bricked up and when the devotions of the
English Catholic Church rang out within these
walls. And you can turn and look up at that great
gap-toothed tower, and imagine what it must have
been like to watch it fall.